CES 2015

This week LG revealed the first look at their ultra-premium series of products by the name of LG Signature, and within this collection, the LG G6. The LG G6 is one of two 2016 4K OLED TVs the company is showing off with Dolby Vision inside and a picture-on-glass design. The LG G6 works with an extremely slim 2.57-mm OLED panel up front, attached to the glass sheet that sits in front of it. LG says that this attachment is being done here for the first time, made possible by OLED's "revolutionary" self-lighting technology, requiring (therefore) no backlight.

Tired of walking around everywhere? The team behind the Segway thought you might be, but their design was awkward at best. the big handlebar rising up from the pedestal made you wonder if you were on some sort of odd scooter, which is counterintuitive when you’re essentially standing still. The IO Hawk, fist unveiled at CES this year, is like a Segway, but ditches the weird handlebar, leaving you free to move about and balance a bit more naturally. For $1,800, it can be yours, too.

Saygus made a rather ambitious gamble last November when it announced its return to the mobile industry with an almost unbelievable smartphone. It seems that the company is trying to make good on that promise, at least with a first run of the Saygus V2, not version 2 but "V-Squared". The smartphone is indeed everything that was rumored to be and more. The device does sport an almost unbelievable 320 GB of storage, but don't be fooled. It's simply the total that you can get with two microSD card slots.

Without a doubt one of the strangest devices we saw this past week at CES 2015 were the JBL Synchros S210BT set of earbuds. They fit (snugly) in your ear in a normal enough manner, and they're wireless - nothing especially new there. But with the JBL Reflect Response and the JBL Synchros S210BT, you'll be using gesture control to move between tracks. Moving your hands left to right, right to left, up and down, you're able to do more than just control audio - you can answer calls, as well.

We entered the room Oculus VR had prepared for us not knowing exactly what we were in for. Not the Samsung Gear VR - surely not - that's already nearly a consumer product. Instead, Oculus had a padded room ready for us. Not because the SlashGear team is ready for straight jackets, but because this demonstration required that we be in as quiet an environment as possible. This demonstration - of the newest Oculus Rift headset prototype Crescent Bay, beyond the DK2 - required that we stand on a platform 4 feet by 4 feet wide in the center of a room that was perhaps 12 feet square. We were dropped immediately into a series of demonstrations.

This little beast may be cute, but it packs a surprising punch of sound quality. What you're working with here is Bluetooth connectivity to your mobile smart devices for music or audio for entertainment on the go. JBL GO is a box of sound blasting you'll be able to fit in your pocket, working with built-in speakerphone abilities and a whopping 5 hours of sound playback. This past week at CES 2015 we got to get up close and personal with the whole color collection.

To give an extra punch to the release of their several new pairs of headphones and speakers this week, Harman employed The Hottest Band in the World: KISS. A miniature concert took place at The Joint inside the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, and with the HTC Desire EYE, we went about capturing it. What follows is a brief account of the power of the audio brand Harman and a microcosm indicator of the year they expect to have with the products they've revealed this week - massive, that is to say.

You could hardly walk five paces through the halls at CES 2015 without stumbling over a wireless light bulb. Connected lighting seems determined to be the point of entry to domestic home automation, and there are plenty - startups and larger - hoping to corner the market. Ironically, then, the company which arguably created the market, Philips, had decamped to a nearby hotel, outfitting a suite with a full array of hue bulbs and lamps. I stopped by to get a demo of the newest 12 Monkeys hue light-soundtrack support, as well as to find out what's coming up next as the smart home accelerates.

It's time for the officially Apple licensed Lighting-connector earbuds and headphones to begin arriving, and they're starting with Harman's audio brand JBL. The JBL Reflect Aware earbuds bring on the lightest-in-class ABL headphone technology with features that'd normally require a separate power source to function. Here, though, the audio product works with a Lightning Connector or Micro-USB - depending on the pair you get. While JBL and Harman haven't announced a release date yet, these headphones (or earbuds, whatever you want to call them), are fully functional right here right now.

It’s the biggest technology show of the calendar, and so expectations of CES are always high. Each year, companies compete to bring their A-game, but there’s inevitably some that stand out as more innovative, more feature-packed, more beautifully designed, or just more lust-worthy than their rivals. They’re the products we want to celebrate in SlashGear’s Best of CES 2015 - read on for the full list of this year’s winners.

With CES winding down, the SlashGear crew now has some time to take a step back and consider what just happened. We learned a lot, saw a lot, and walked away mostly excited for the future. The Internet of Things is still alive and well, but there’s another topic we’d like to discuss today: wearables. the darling of CES 2014 came back to us in 2015 as well, but we’re starting to get a better idea of where the genre is going.

Parrot has sent out their drones in the sky and on the ground to capture the audience’s attention at CES. Flying gracefully in the air and roughing it on the ground has stirred up a crowd that shows strong interest in the prototype drones. Parrot's success with drones started back in 2010 with the AR.Drone, then branching out from flying models to other form factors. It's those which come in for attention here at CES, with a range of upgrades that includes a beast that does off-road droning.